JOHANNESBURG – FNB’s Easy Account is now available to all FNB customers regardless of their income level, the bank announced on Tuesday.
The announcement came a week after a Moneyweb article that criticised nonsensical elements of FNB’s new Personal Pricing Guide, which takes effect on July 1.
“We’ve been planning to have this account available across the branch network for some time and it is unrelated to pricing issues,” CEO of Value Banking Solutions, Irlon Terblanche told Moneyweb.
“We want to acquire more customers and one of the ways we can do that is by opening up a low-cost offering to a broader market,” Terblanche explained. “It is also for customer retention. We have customers leaving us on a monthly basis for lower cost options,” he confirmed.
FNB has linked a Savings Pocket to the Easy Account, which offers interest of up to 4.85%, depending on the balance in your account. “There is no monthly fee and transfers into and out of the linked Savings Pocket are free,” added Terblanche.
This is significantly higher than the FNB Gold and Platinum accounts, which offer interest of up to 2.75%, depending on your account balance. Capitec offers interest of between 4.4% and 9% on daily balances in savings accounts.
How the Easy Account weighs up
Terblanche conceded that FNB customers looking for lower cost options did tend to migrate to Capitec, although he said the Easy Account was not necessarily a direct response to Capitec.
Nonetheless, the monthly fee and ATM withdrawal charge on the Easy Account is 5c cheaper than on Capitec’s Global One account.
Here’s an overview of low-cost bank account charges for a range of services across Absa, Capitec, FNB, Nedbank and Standard Bank. This is not an exhaustive list of services and it would be important to check the charges most relevant to how you bank.
The Easy Account doesn’t have credit facilities (Global One does), nor does it give customers access to FNB’s eBucks Rewards programme or special deals on smart devices. Easy Account holders can have credit cards, as their creditworthiness would be assessed separately, but cannot do cross-border transactions, Terblanche said.
He said that FNB expected to see some migration of existing clients onto the Easy Account, although this was unlikely to be significant. “We don’t anticipate major cannibalisation, but we will monitor it. In general, clients that enjoy the value-adds that come with the Gold and other accounts are sticky,” he said.
